Open Hatch

Mobsters and Mormons is out in theaters - here is a theater listing.

I am credited in the movie by my full name, Richard Alexander Hall.

I expect to have a clip of my scene fairly soon. Meanwhile, praises and criticisms of the film are collected on this page, and clips of it also. There are a few other entries on it in this Mobsters and Mormons category.

The Cast

I think all the leads did great work, particularly the ones portraying parents (which now strikes me) - Marc DeCarlo, Jeanette Puhich, Scott Christopher, and Britani Bateman. IMDB has a cast listing. Marc DeCarlo is praised in most of the reviews as really carrying the piece, and I agree.

Praise

It won best Actor, Actress, Screenplay and Director against three other narrative films in the 2005 SpudFest.

Writes John Moyer of the response at SpudFest:

.. perhaps most exciting is the overwhelming response from those people who are not Mormon who live far outside the proverbial Utah-Idaho Jell-O Belt. It was great to have these people come up to me and provide such a wonderful response and wanting to know if it would come to their local theaters in various parts of the country and when they could get the DVD.

Here are a slew of overall positive reviews - especially the first I think - all-encompassingly (Probably the first formal review in any media, too), Ogden Standard Examiner (gives away many of the gags), The Salt Lake Tribune, BoxOffice, Meridian Magazine, The Movie Show on KSL (Real Audio File - Doug Wright: “Laughing my butt off.”

I have heard both a theater-goer and theater owner at different times describe it as “cute”. That bodes well with the women - both these people were.

Pseudonymous Flog’s entry on it backfired beautifully! - in the comments.

Criticism

Everyone who criticized this film said it was better than previous films from HaleStorm, with 2 and 1/2 stars plus.

The Tamotometerr isn’t out on this one yet - I’m hoping to report to it the two positive reviews I have here which it doesn’t have.

Jeff Vice of the Deseret News mirthlessly shows his lack of mirth with the film. He also declares it predictable.

A Daily Herald critic (I know this fellow - we are both children of Orem Public Library staff) declared with calcified stoicism: implausible and slapstic. He did applaud the performances.

My counter-criticism

But criticism in our society is almost always purely logical and emotionally detached: therefore heartless.

Were all of the gags predictable? Surely not. Than what of the ones that weren’t? Do you discount the lot of them for the ones that were? What a lousy approach. As for what was accurately predicted - for me, predictable doesn’t equate with bad. A suspension of disbelief lives in the moment, not the future.

Meridian: there really are a lot of Mormons as heartless as some of the depictions in this movie. Really. It didn’t take it too far - that aspect was realistic. It was also surreal, but the whole film is.

This school paper review says it isn’t as good as The Singles Ward. You’re alone on that one, kid.

Silliness - isn’t the impossibility and silliness of the film’s situation just the point? And it holds the territory it sets up for itself really well! Silliness in life is enjoyment - detachment isn’t. If we expect comedy to be all intellect (never mind that this film has that, too) - we’ll lose out half the picture: the part that laughs at the dumb, silly, whimsical, angry, outrageous, pathetic etc. We may also, in discarding humanity’s dark emotions, overlook their opposite: the humanely noble.

Which the Daily Herald critic didn’t mention - he used the phrase “shamelessly crowd pleasing.” But this implies a place where there might (should?) be shame and there isn’t. Is there really shame in pleasing a crowd? Because our appetite for the absurd, unreal, and idiotic is so shameful? But these things are part of the human - in addition to the part of us that is a robot. Would we really rather that films be made by impossibly intelligent robots, finding pleasure in the seemingly rational possible, while overlooking the fact that the whole of every film is exactly what humanity itself is: contrived?

Human audiences enjoy films - robot critics seldom do. I know that I am calling my critic friend a robot. If it’s just that the flavor of slapstick and silliness isn’t yours, I have no qualm. But if you don’t like slapstic, period - I’ll chain you to a chair, routinely eloctrocute you until 3 am, feed you intravaneous caffiene, and force upon you a marathon of slapstick idiot comedies - until you are reprogrammed.

Clips

I recommend seeing the film instead of these clips, because these have gag spoilers.